A$AP Rocky attempts to update New York hip-hop.

A$AP Rocky, born Rakim Mayers, is a rapper from Harlem who has been tasked with returning his neighborhood, and maybe all of New York, to a central position in hip-hop. In the past decade, prominent rappers have come from places—Toronto, say—not associated with rap’s early days, a shift that has frustrated those who believe that the genre’s flowers should stay near its roots. Rocky’s new album, “Long.Live.A$AP,” which débuted at No. 1, probably won’t succeed in restoring New York’s prominence, not because there’s anything wrong with the album but because the record proves that rap is moving at a brisk, healthy pace into a period in which region and style are no longer essential identifiers. Though he was named after the legendary golden-age New York m.c. who was half of the duo Eric B. and Rakim, Rocky has a taste for Houston hip-hop, which moves at a more leisurely pace than New York rap—sometimes owing to the recreational use of cough syrup with codeine, which Rocky also favors. Like Andre 3000 and Kanye West, he name-checks fashion designers such as Raf Simons, but he doesn’t have those rappers’ stylistic daring: his bandannas and jeans still read “m.c.” from far away. What Rocky really stands for is the long-term shift away from m.c.s who are merely clever versifiers and toward those who combine personality, vocal timbre, and confidence to establish an identity that marks a body of work.

Rocky’s life lends itself to compelling first-person narratives. His father was a drug dealer who went to prison, and his mother moved him and his siblings from shelter to shelter in New York and North Carolina. When he was thirteen, his older brother, Ricky, was shot and killed. Until recently, he was a crack dealer; he claims that before Sony/RCA gave him three million dollars, in 2011, he had only three thousand dollars in his bank account. Rocky’s troubles come up in rhymes, along with a simultaneous desire to distance himself from writerly styles and introspection.

On “Suddenly,” Rocky rhymes over a dusty, slowed-down soul sample that feels like a production from the early nineties, decelerated for a Houston audience and streaked with the whistling, scraping sounds, and ambient washes—once more common to electronic music—that are now familiar sounds in rap. Rocky has a casual, midrange voice that sounds happy to move between sluggish and crisp deliveries. He begins “Suddenly” with the kind of memory common in the rhymes of established New York m.c.s like Nas and the members of the Wu-Tang Clan: “On the park bench playing checkers, sipping nectar, Girbaud jeans with hologram straps and reflectors. We had cookouts and dirt bikes and dice games and fistfights and fish fries and shootouts like one SIG with two rounds.” But, as if he senses that these lines might make him sound overly sensitive, his next verse qualifies those reflections: “Don’t view me as no conscious cat, this ain’t no conscious rap. Fuck the conscious crap, my Mac’ll push your conscience back.” After two and a half minutes, a dried-out kick drum and a small snare with harsh, choppy high hats blend into the track, enhancing the disconnected feel. Leaving behind the stories, Rocky switches to boilerplate rap, bragging about his cars—“Gold slabs on the ’Lac when I spin, then it’s back to the back of the Benz, lean back in the back with the Henn”—lines that could have been programmed by a random rap-lyric generator in 2003.

“Long.Live.A$AP” was made with the help of Rocky’s crew, A$APMob(A$AP stands for Always Strive and Prosper), and it bounces between poles: at times, Rocky performs unusually skilled trim couplets, while at other times he repeats the mantras of hedonist rap, which document car collections, guns, getting high, anonymous sex partners. A strong and varied list of producers makes this album an infinitely more interesting piece of music than Rocky’s début mix tape, “Live.Love.A$AP.” A$AP Ty Beats, Noah Shebib, Clams Casino, and Hit-Boy all contribute to a sound that stays low and unaggressive and at the same time detailed and bassy. It’s a savvy blending of Southern pace, the melodic textures associated with L.A. rap, and the New York commitment to off-kilter samples and the graininess of mixtapes.

Rocky is attempting something you could call persona rap, or pulp rap. The point is not lyrical dexterity but the m.c.’s ability to sell his vision of success. While some rappers, like New York’s Fabolous, won’t let a verse out of the studio without executing some phonetic triple Axels, others, such as Rick Ross and the Oakland legend Too $hort, are like the improbable superheroes of hip-hop—their rhymes may not be as crisp, but their lyrics are bold and aggressive. Like Rocky, they’re selling a dream of luxury and braggadocio. It’s unclear whether every claim they make is true, but that’s relevant only if you demand that all rap be confessional, which many people do, whether they realize it or not. The desire for authenticity has led some critics to deplore rhymes that focus on the blockhead fantasies of gunplay, sex, and drugs, or whatever constitutes a rapper’s idea of freedom and pleasure. Film’s version of persona rappers would be Jean-Claude Van Damme or Bruce Willis, tweaking genre norms and keeping expectations low. Nobody wonders whether Willis can make a car fly through a tunnel and skid on its side, nor do they wonder why his character in “Die Hard” can’t be tender for more than a few minutes.

In rap, as in the movies, sticking to genre is often the selling point, and rappers like Rocky are as wary of innovation as they are of being badly dressed. Outsized ambition comes off as corny, which is anathema to the persona rapper. If you feel and sound at peace with your tough-guy indulgences, you have done the job. Rappers have aliases, and that distance means something. Rakim Mayers plays A$APRocky, and his success or failure depends on defining that persona and holding to it.

On “Long.Live.A$AP,” Rocky ranges too far afield, becomes too ambitious. He’s most appealing in the purple fog, remembering his roots and then partying hard enough to forget them. He’s less effective as a ringleader, as becomes evident on “Fuckin’ Problems,” an ensemble song anchored by the popular m.c.s Drake, 2 Chainz, and Kendrick Lamar. The dilemma mentioned in the title is sex itself, and how much time it takes up. Rocky is convincing enough as a single-issue hedonist, but here he makes the mistake of performing with rappers who aren’t afraid of unalloyed cleverness and wicked, careful delivery. After rapping lines like “I be fucking broads like I be fucking bored,” Rocky gets outclassed by his collaborators. 2 Chainz, a rapper who has little interest in highfalutin language, handles most of the speedy hook: “I love bad bitches, that’s my fucking problem. And yeah I like to fuck, I got a fucking problem.” Drake dances around and dismisses competitors, a bragging style that he revivifies: “Oh word? Ain’t heard my album? who you sleeping on? You should print the lyrics out and have a fucking read-along.” Lamar has a gently morphing, roughed-up voice and changes timbre every line or so, sounding casually devious. He ends his verse by pretending he can pull off a date that he certainly can’t. He clogs up his cadence, dropping clumps of words like newspaper bundles being thrown from a truck: “Halle, Berry, halle, lujah, holla, back, I’ll, do ya, beast.”

Drake and Lamar are classically better rappers than Rocky. More important, they both sound like fully formed personalities, which they accomplish with or without their verbal facility. A$AP Rocky and his crew have a hit album. But, in the long run, they’ll be allowed to be generic only if they figure out how the genre works. ♦

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